The Last Man on Earth (1964)

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow

Screenplay by Ubaldo Ragona, William Leicester, Furio M. Monetti, and Richard Matheson, based on the novel I Am Legend by Matheson

Runtime: 1 hr, 27 min

If you will recall, last year was a pretty big time for end of the world hysteria, what with the Mayan calendar and all.  But, as I like to say, we’ve been thinking about the end of the world since the beginning of it, so it should be no surprise that there have been a ton of movies on that subject.  Despite that, I’ve not seen too many films in that vein.  I guess the topic has never interested me that much.  That said, the little description of The Last Man on Earth found on TCM’s website was all that was needed to entice me into watching.

The picture opens in December 1968, three years after a killer bacteria wiped out all of humanity.  All, it seems, except for one man: Dr. Robert Morgan, played by Vincent Price.  We watch as Morgan tries to live a routine life while fighting off the horde of vampire zombies into which the bacteria has turned humanity.  Yes, this movie could probably be re-titled Vincent Price, Vampire Hunter, and if that doesn’t sound like the most awesome thing ever, then you and I will have a respectful disagreement on the matter.

And yet, The Last Man on Earth is not, in fact, the most awesome thing ever, even though just by its premise it should be.  The issue stems from the structure of the movie.  When we talk about a movie having a “three-act structure”, we speak of very arbitrary divisions within the film.  The Last Man on Earth is different in that the three acts are so clearly divided and so varied in both subject and quality that it feels like three different short films hastily cobbled together into a feature length picture.

The first act of the movie is easily the strongest, and it’s also the most adventurous.  The first half-hour of the film is dedicated to Morgan’s day-to-day existence, from wondering what he should have for breakfast to replenishing his supply of garlic to burning the bodies.  On top of that, there’s virtually no dialogue but rather a running inner monologue in Morgan’s head.  I appreciated just how quotidian this section was, giving the audience of good look into life so long after the end.  The film’s first line sums it up beautifully: “Another day to live through.  Better get started.”

But then, after a few days of Morgan’s life, the film enters a flashback to the events leading up to the outbreak.  Morgan was hard at work researching a cure for the disease, which was spreading through Europe and believed to be airborne.  He also has a family to think of: his wife, Virginia (Emma Danieli), and a young daughter (Christi Courtland), along with a friend named Ben (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) who suspects that the disease not only kills people, but also turns them into the vampires.  Slowly but surely, it becomes clear that Ben was right.

There are so many things wrong with the section I’ll have trouble enumerating them.  Primarily, though, I feel that the presence of the flashback itself is a mistake.  The mundane beauty of the first act, the fact that Morgan treats the horde of vampires who want his blood as nonchalantly as possible, makes the back-story so much more mysterious.  That the second act gives pretty definitive answers as to what happened (at least in America) removes the element of the unknown and actually renders the first third of the film less enjoyable in retrospect.

On top of that, the second act is where the technically limitations of The Last Man on Earth are put front and center.  The film did not have very much of a budget, and does it show.  Most blatantly, the dubbing of the dialogue is off far too often to be a glitch; whoever was in charge matching words to lip movements fell asleep at the wheel.  And the acting leaves so much to be desired, most tragically from Price.  Price is great when giving voice-over in the movie, but his spoken dialogue is just pathetic, as if he’s reading from the script instead of conversing.

The final act returns to the present, and while I won’t go into too much detail, you could probably guess that this act contains the big action-packed conclusion.  Only, there’s precious little tension in the proceedings.  The obvious threat, the vampires, are shown in the first act to be so clumsy and slow that it’s no wonder that Morgan seems to think of them as a nuisance.  There is a far more menacing threat which appears in the third act, but their introduction is so rushed that there is no time to build them up as an enemy.

Given the strength of the first half-hour of the movie, I think it’s easy to see my overall frustration with The Last Man on Earth.  There is no good reason why the team involved should have dropped the ball so badly with the other sixty minutes.  And yet, that first act is so enjoyable and well played that I am tempted to recommend the film anyway—if only to get others to share in my disappointment.  Or, perhaps there’s this strategy: when the film starts to fade into the flashback, pretend it’s fading into the end credits.